Trade mag honors scrap business
Columbus company’s 2nd award in a row
COLUMBUS, Miss. — Benny Dora operates a massive machine with a 60-inch magnet picking up scrap steel as the heat beats down on a recent Tuesday afternoon.
The equipment he is operating is worth more than $600,000. Dora knows what he’s doing. He’s been working his craft for 57 years.
“That’s one of the finest men you’ll ever meet,” Gregg Rader said as he stood on a makeshift balcony behind his office overlooking the organized chaos that is the scrap yard of Columbus Recycling Corp.
Rader is the company’s CEO.
Columbus Recycling has been named the small to mid-sized scrap company of the year by American Metal Market, a trade magazine covering everything metals nationwide. It was the second straight year that the Columbus business has taken home the award.
Dora is the longest-term employee. Rader and company President Robert Craig say it is employees like Dora who create an atmosphere that makes them successful.
“It’s a total team effort here, a family effort,” Rader said.
Columbus Recycling has grown since Rader took over the controlling interest in the company from Weiss in 1996. A name change in 2014 from Columbus Scrap Material to Columbus Recycling Corp. reflects the company’s expansion regionally and the reusing nature of the scrap industry.
At the turn of the millennium, Rader began expanding the business from a single scrap yard on The Island to five yards in two states. The company acquired sites in Iuka and Meridian, and in Memphis and Chattanooga, Tennessee.
In 2000, annual revenues were under $4 million. Last year, revenue hit $100 million following the name change and an arrangement with Trivest Partners in Miami.
Rader’s company is making big money, but the feel is small.
The company has 80100 employees, about 45 of whom work in Columbus.
Scrap is a reliable business, though prices of steel and other metals are constantly changing.
“This actual steel could be five different things,” Rader said. “The life of this will go on forever.”
He works with all kinds of clients.
Large companies such as Steel Dynamics Inc. and PACCAR have been added to the list of the company’s partners as a result of industrial expansion in Lowndes County. Craig said Columbus Recycling works with the lion’s share of local manufacturers. Occasionally it will bid on a project for local governments. It goes small time, too. Every day, Rader said, hundreds of people come to drop off cans.
“It cleans up the community,” Rader said. “Where all this material is on the side of the road, people have a place to take the material and get paid for the material ... there’s people that bring material to us every day, and that’s part of what helps them feed their families.”
In 2014, Columbus Recycling processed more than 200,000 tons of ferrous metals. The facility in Columbus cleans, sorts, compacts, bales, shears and bundles scrap for foundries, melt shops and steel-processing facilities such as SDI.
Rader said the company also exports lots of scrap to developing nations, mainly China. As the Chinese grow and industrialize, they remain about 15 years away from having scrap metal of their own to remake, Rader explained, so they buy from U.S. companies.
Out in the yard, employees operate towering magnets and precision blow torches. It is hot and loud. They cut up pieces of metal to meet the orders of companies such as SDI and Nucor in Alabama.
It’s hot, hard work, but Columbus Recycling has no problem finding employees and keeping them, which is why Rader and Craig think they continue to be successful.
Leaving the company is hard, which may be why Dora continues to operate his magnet.
“You almost have to die to leave,” Craig said.